“ I had to bribe Dr. LeMonte to get her here,” she told Eriq.
“ Bribe? How?”
“ The FBI’s picking up her tab.”
He cleared his throat. “A considerable one, I’m sure.”
“ You can bank on it.”
“ What else did you promise her?”
“ A week in Miami.”
“ Jesus, at our expense?”
Jessica nodded.
“ I thought you and Dr. LeMonte were friends.” Between them a VCR remote lay waiting for Quincey and Samernow to arrive for a viewing of the taped session between Dr. LeMonte and Judy Templar.
“ We are friends,” she told Eriq.
He laughed heartily at this.
“ After all, she had to put all her regular patients on hold to fly down to meet with Judy Templar.”
Quincey burst through the door with his usual aplomb and sat heavily in one of the chairs, which hadn’t given an inch for anyone else but made an exception in Quincey’s case. Samernow slowly followed, eyes averted, head bowed, again looking despondent. Jessica wondered at his mood swings.
She got right to business, telling the others why she had called them all in to view the tape. “I think Judy Templar saw the Night Crawler and that inside her head, she has a physical description. Dr. LeMonte and a police sketch artist are working on that as we speak. For now, I would just like you to listen and learn what you can about Patric-”
“ Patric?” asked Quincey, his brows arching.
“ It’s what he calls himself; at least, it’s what Judy Templar knows him as.”
“ No last name?” asked Samernow, alert now.
“ ‘ Fraid not.”
“ Didn’t we have another so-called witness to ID some guy named Patric, Mark?” Quincey asked, searching his memory and his partner’s bloodshot eyes.
“ I don’t know… maybe… Yeah, one of our hundreds of so-called eyewitnesses,” he sarcastically replied.
“ I’m talking about the one you’ve expended so much energy in trying to locate again, Mark.”
Samernow glowered at his partner, then slowly began to talk about the circumstances. “Said she’d been abducted by this beautiful man, taken to a boat and tied up for several days while he repeatedly raped, sodomized and choked her. Said she survived only by faking unconsciousness and escaping and swimming a hundred yards to shore.”
“ When did this happen? Why haven’t you told us about this witness?”
“ She disappeared on us. Left the state, but we have notes.”
“ Get them-after you listen to this.” Jessica clicked on the VCR and TV screen. On the screen were the distressed teen and the exquisitely dressed, very chic psychiatrist, Donna’s hair still with its salon patina and curl.
Jessica then got up and left the men to view the tape alone. She had already been through it three times. She went for a cup of coffee, running the entire scene described by Judy Templar in her mind’s eye. Hearing Judy Templar’s hypnotized drawl in her ear.
Donna had drawn on Judy’s considerable memory of that evening when her best friend. Tammy Sue Sheppard, disappeared down a wharf and to her death.
Judy’s hypnotic trance had her speaking in the third person, a technique Donna LeMonte had used on Jessica on frequent occasions, as it supposedly helped patients separate themselves from the moment.
Coffee in hand, fatigue setting in already at 3 p.m., Jessica was listening to the taped session unfold for the fourth time, without benefit of high technology, merely by using her own internal Internet:
They were all at the Magic Wand, a bar and grill built out over the river where it met the ocean at the tip of the South Miami Beach strip.
Judy frowned in a pretense of anger, repeating the name Patric, mocking Tammy in a half-kidding, half-angry manner, “Patric without the K, Patric without the K,” until it became a boozy chant. Cynthia dug back into her chair and consoled herself with her third Bloody Mary, looking and feeling grumpy. Judy remained standing for a time to watch her exuberant friend Tammy rush after her pickup, literally skipping out to the harbor boats along the planked dock, where she disappeared among the enormous floating city, her form lost to the angles and edges, the rigging and white sails and tall masts which comfortably bobbed in a lullaby of noise created by ocean breeze and swells, turning the poles and ropes into giant chimes there where the Intracoastal Waterway met the incoming ocean tide.
Judy then breathed a great sigh of resignation, turned to Cynthia and asked, “What’s the name of the boat?”
“ What boat?”
“ Cynthia! The one Tammy’s going on. What did she say the name of the boat was?”
“ Oh, I dunno… and I don’t care,” Cynthia said, lounging unladylike in her deck chair.
Judy suddenly called out after Tammy, both curious and a little unsure of her friend’s wisdom at going off with the stranger this second time, however handsome, virile or loaded he might be. Earlier, he had taken Tammy Sue to a nearby restaurant, plying her with wine and shellfish.
“ Forget it,” said Cynthia. “She’s long gone. I thought when he came back here, that he was going to… that he might… that maybe they were… you know…”
“ No, I don’t know,” Judy replied, staling across at her boozed-up friend. “Know what?”
“ Ask us to join ‘em.”
“ Join ‘em for what?”
“ Judy, you’re so mired in your middle-class mind.”
“ God, no… not even drunk, Cyn-”
“ He’s such a hunk, though…”
“ You’re serious. You were going to suggest that we all three do him, weren’t you?”
“ No! Yes! No, maybe… I didn’t suggest it. His eyes suggested it. Did you see the way he was undressing me and you while he had Tammy on his arm?”
“ God, you, Cyn… You would do it, wouldn’t you?”
“ Well, I didn’t say I would, no.”
“ A three-way! God, Cyn, you’re awful.”
Cynthia flailed her drunken hands in the air. “I just thought that maybe Tammy’d have the decency to invite us to join them, so we could get to, you know, know him, too.”
“ Hell, I’ve taught Tammy better’n that, Cyn.”
Cynthia only frowned and waved her now-empty glass.
Judy suggested, “Let’s go have a look at the boat while they’re pulling away. Get the call numbers, you know, just in case.”
“ Call numbers? Planes have call numbers, not boats.”
“ Boats have identifying numbers, too. It’s the law.”
“ I didn’t know that.”
“ Well, you grew up in Indiana. I wouldn’t expect you to know.”
“ But we can’t go traipsing after them.”
“ Just out to the end of the dock is all. Tammy told me the guy wants to take her to the Caribbean.”
“ Tonight?”
“ Well, no… I don’t think tonight, but sometime.”
“ Damn, he gets better and better all the time. Where in the Caribbean?”
“ I think she said the Caribbean… isn’t the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean Sea?”
“ Geography’s not my best subject; never was,” replied Cynthia.
“ So suppose she says yes and they just, you know, disappear for two weeks on that gorgeous sailing ship? What’re we going to tell Tammy’s parents when they call?”
“ God, they’d flip, wouldn’t they? I’d pay to see that.”
“ So, come on. Let’s at least go see the boat off.”
“ But it won’t look right. She’ll think we’re jealous.”
“ Goddamnit, Cynthia, we are jealous.”
“ Yeah, but she doesn’t have to know it.”
“ Cynthia, Cynthia… she already knows that much.”
“ But to give her the satisfaction? No way!”
“ Well, I’m going to watch them shove off.”
“ Not before you dig deep into your pockets.”
“ What?”
“ This’s your round of drinks, remember?” Cynthia waved the empty again, this time like a flag.